


A Spirit In 221B

by bbcatemysoul



Series: A Spirit In 221B [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, First Meetings, Fluff, Ghost!Sherlock, Humor, M/M, Paranormal, Past Drug Use, Pre-Slash, Unflappable!John, brief mention of drug use, mention of drug overdose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-02
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2017-12-22 04:38:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/909013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcatemysoul/pseuds/bbcatemysoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John rents a flat, only to find that it's already occupied by the ghost of a previous tenant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. John Moves In

* * *

 

John followed Mrs. Hudson up the stairs to 221B, hanging back as she fumbled with the keys and unlocked the door. 

“There's another room up the stairs, there,” she gestured to the stairs leading up to the next level, “if you want a second bedroom, or an office, or just storage space or what have you.” She pushed the door to the flat open and beckoned John inside. 

“Oh, it's all furnished,” John observed as he stepped into the sitting area, taking in the sofa and mismatched arm chairs arranged comfortably around the room. 

Mrs. Hudson nodded and looked around the room, perplexed, as though things were not quite as she remembered leaving them. “Yes, but if you have things of your own, this old stuff can be stored. And you can rearrange things as you like, of course.” 

“I barely have anything of my own,” John replied, walking through kitchen and down the hall to peer into the bathroom and the bedroom. “Yes, I think this will do nicely. Easy distance from work, too. How are the neighbours? Not loud in the middle of the night or anything?” 

The elderly landlady looked askance and wrung her hands. “No, no problems with neighbours at all. Some noises from the restaurant downstairs during the day. And Mrs. Turner's tenants next door are very good, never any trouble.” 

“Good, then.” John felt a niggle of concern at Mrs. Hudson's apparent nervousness, but nothing seemed out of place. “It's exactly what I'm wanting.” 

Mrs. Hudson smiled and ushered him back toward the door and down the stairs. She seemed relieved to hurry him out and lock the door behind her. “Good! When would you like to move in?”

 

* * *

 

John didn't have much to move, but he took a long weekend to settle into his new flat anyway. True to Mrs. Hudson's words, the neighbours seemed quiet. The flat was peaceful and cosy, and John wasted no time unpacking his boxes, organizing his books in the built-in bookcases, and rearranging the furniture to his liking. 

On Tuesday morning, as John prepared to leave the flat, he found that he had mislaid his keys. 

“I could have sworn I left them on the corner of the table,” he muttered to himself, rapping his knuckles on the empty spot on the kitchen table where he was certain he had seen his keys when he got up to make his tea and breakfast an hour and a half before. 

Twenty minutes of searching confirmed that the wayward keys were not under the table, in the bedroom or the bathroom, in the refrigerator, under the sitting room furniture, on the mantelpiece, or in the fireplace. 

When it became evident that the search for his keys was going to make him late for work, John left his flat unlocked behind him and gave the staircase a cursory search on the way downstairs, before knocking on Mrs. Hudson's door. 

The landlady cracked the door open, then, realising it was John, opened it all the way and beckoned him in. “Good morning, John! Breakfast before you head off, dear? I've got extra.” 

John couldn't help but smile at his landlady's instinctive mothering. “No, thank you, Mrs. Hudson. Sorry to bother you at this hour. It's just that I seem to have misplaced my keys... I wanted to see if you'd be here this afternoon, to let me in. Or if you have a spare I can borrow, maybe?” 

Mrs. Hudson cringed and bit her lip. “I never had another spare made up after-” She broke off and shook her head. “Well, I lost the spare and haven't replaced it. But I'll be here all day; just buzz the bell when you get home.” 

“Thanks.” John turned to leave. 

When he got home in the afternoon, Mrs. Hudson let him in, saying she had kept an eye out for his keys when she was cleaning on the staircase, but she hadn't seen them. 

When he entered his flat and tossed his wallet and mobile down on the kitchen table, he heard a metallic clink as his mobile struck his keys, which were lying on the corner of the table just where he was certain he had last seen them. 

“Losing my mind,” he muttered as he pulled dinner from the freezer and put it in the microwave. 

When he took his dinner into the sitting room so that he could watch telly while he ate, one of the armchairs was blocking his view of the screen from the sofa. With a start, he realised that both chairs had been moved back to where they were before he'd rearranged over the weekend. 

John frowned, sat his plate of microwaved lasagne on the coffee table, and went to rearrange the armchairs in front of the fireplace so that he could watch telly from the sofa. The moment his back was turned, he heard a thunk and a splat behind him, and the sound of his fork skittering across the floorboards. Sure enough, when he turned to look, his plate had flipped off the table and landed face down in front of the sofa, on top of his food. 

“Bugger!” He kicked the corner of the armchair in frustration and then set about cleaning up the now-inedible remains of his meal. 

After microwaving another dinner and wasting most of the evening watching telly and staring at a blank blog entry on his laptop, John decided to turn in. It was a busy day at work, and he fell asleep easily. 

He was startled awake some time later by an abrasive screeching. He sat up in bed, fumbling for the clock to illuminate the display. It was 3:15. He shook his head and tossed back the covers, pursuing the screeching into the sitting room. He couldn't tell which wall the noise might be coming through, so he had no idea which neighbours might be the culprits. His sleep-addled mind slowly cleared enough for him to recognize that the noise bore a vague resemblance to music, perhaps a violin. After several minutes, it reached a crescendo, then gradually tapered off and ceased. 

John stood in the centre of the sitting room, bewildered. 

He never did get back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

When he was ready to leave for work on Wednesday, his keys were missing from the kitchen table. He found himself once more knocking at Mrs. Hudson's door. 

“Did you not find your keys, dear?” she greeted him, a look of concern on her kind face. 

John rubbed his tired eyes. “I found them when I got home yesterday, but... well, I seem to have misplaced them again this morning. I'm so, so sorry to be a bother, Mrs. Hudson, but-” 

“Oh! No bother, dear,” the landlady tutted. “I'm going out to do my shopping today, but I'll be home by the time you get back, I'm sure. While I'm out, I'll go ahead and have another spare key made.” 

John frowned, thinking it a bit odd that Mrs. Hudson didn't seem the least bit irritated at her tenant's inability to keep track of his own set of keys. “Um, Mrs. Hudson, this may sound odd, but... you weren't- I mean, you didn't- ah, you weren't up to my flat and rearranging the furniture while I was at work yesterday, were you?” 

Mrs. Hudson looked scandalised. “What? Of course not! I wouldn't dream of coming in while you weren't at home and moving your things around. Why? Did it seem like someone had been in?” 

“Well, yes, actually, I rearranged the chairs in the sitting room over the weekend, and when I came home last night, they were moved back to where they were before. I just thought, maybe you had been up. Which is fine, by the way,” he hastily added. “I just wondered.” 

“Oh, you know, I _was_ up,” she amended, slapping her forehead. “I couldn't remember if I had gotten the fireplace cleaned out properly before you moved in, and I went up while you were at work to have a look. I completely forgot about it till just now! Old age, you know!” She laughed self-deprecatingly, but her eyes kept shifting apprehensively toward the floor above. 

John nodded, frowning again. “Oh. Well, that's fine, then. As I said, I just wondered. I guess I'm off to work. Oh! One more thing... which neighbour is it that plays very poor violin at three in the morning?” 

Mrs. Hudson shrugged. “I haven't heard any violin. Have a nice day at work, dear! I'll be here when you get home! Just ring the bell!” And she abruptly closed her door in John's face. 

John couldn't help thinking, as he made his way to work on the tube, that Mrs. Hudson was keeping something from him.

 

* * *

 

By Saturday morning, John had determined that it was better to move the telly to a new spot than to expect the armchairs to stay where he wanted them, that he was never to be allowed the use of his own set of keys, that neither of his neighbours was prepared to admit to owning a violin or hearing a violin in the middle of the night, that he should never turn his back on his food if he wished to eat it, that his bookmarks did not like to stay put in his books, and that his blog was capable of writing posts about the contents of his underwear drawer while he was not at home. 

When John woke up on Sunday to find a bunch of his books pulled off the shelves and stacked in one narrow column from floor to ceiling in the centre of the sitting room, he somehow suspected that Mrs. Hudson was not the culprit. 

He stared at the neat stack for a long moment, then closed his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and opened his eyes again. He noticed that the stack was alphabetical by author from top to bottom. 

“Right, then,” he muttered, marching downstairs to rap on Mrs. Hudson's door. 

“Oh, John! You're up. Would you like some breakfast? I've got extra,” Mrs. Hudson gave him her now-familiar greeting. 

He forced a tight smile and shook his head. “No, thank you, Mrs. Hudson, I just, um... Well, you know, there have been quite a few strange things happening upstairs.” 

Mrs. Hudson's face fell. She shifted her weight from foot to foot and twisted her hands together. “Yes, John, I know you've had a bit of trouble this week.” 

John shoved his hands into his pockets and gave a short nod. “You could say that, yeah.” 

His landlady sighed and stared at her feet. “I think you better come in for a cuppa, John, dear.” 

A couple of minutes later, John found himself seated at Mrs. Hudson's small kitchen table with a steaming cup of tea, watching her fidget with a napkin as she sat across from him. 

“You see, John, I've had an awful time keeping tenants these last couple of years,” she began, flickering her sorrowful gaze at him. “A while back, a bit over two years ago, I rented to a young man who- who helped me out once.” 

Her voice quavered and she looked down at her hands, and when she looked back up, John noticed her eyes were wet. He sipped his tea, waiting for her to elaborate. 

“Well, you know, he was an eccentric sort, always getting up to things, doing experiments in the kitchen, up at all hours, making a mess... He did some work helping out one of the officers over at NSY, nice gentleman, but I can't remember his name just now, something- George? Geoffrey? I can't remember,” she rambled off on a tangent, pressing a finger to her mouth as she stared off into space. 

John cleared his throat. “So, what happened, then?” he asked, trying to steer her back on topic. 

“Oh! Yes, well, Sherlock, he had a rough time of things with people, tough time getting along, you know, because he was such a bright young man, and he just saw the world differently, and I- I suppose- it was just very difficult for him to know how to cope with on his own.” She sniffled and a couple of tears ran down her cheeks. She reached up to wipe them away, blinking back more before they could fall. “We all thought he had gotten off the drugs, all of us, even his brother, but Sherlock was so good at hiding things when he wanted to and--” 

Mrs. Hudson's voice broke, and John reached across and covered her hands with his, attempting to comfort her. “Did he...?” John asked in a low voice, suspecting he already knew where the story was going. 

She nodded. “He had an overdose. I was away from home when it happened; his brother was the one who found him, in the sitting room. Anyway he... he doesn't like it when I try to rent out the flat,” she finished, jerking her head in the direction of the flat above. 

John withdrew his hands from Mrs. Hudson's, his brow furrowed. “He... the brother?” he asked, confused. 

“No, no, of course not,” Mrs. Hudson clucked her tongue. “Mycroft chipped in a bit after it happened to help get things cleaned up and ready for a new tenant, and he paid a couple of months' rent till I found someone new, but... I haven't been able to keep anyone because, well- you know, it sounds silly when I say it right out loud, but- Sherlock's never left.” 

John stared at her, dumbfounded, before breaking into a disbelieving giggle. “Never left? Are you...” He cleared his throat and tried again, “Are you seriously trying to tell me you think this former tenant who died in my sitting room is haunting my flat?” 

Mrs. Hudson stared down at her knuckles. “I know it sounds silly, but there's really no other explanation for... well, the things that go on up there. I suppose you'll want to be moving out now, won't you?”

 

* * *

 

John trudged back up the stairs to his flat. The column of books stacked in the middle of the sitting room was just as he had left it. The flat was silent. It felt as though something were waiting for his decision. 

“Oh, stop it, John Watson, you're being ridiculous,” he muttered to himself. He closed the door behind himself and cleared his throat, clenching and unclenching his hands a couple of times as he looked around the room. 

“Um, okay, so... Mrs. Hudson is convinced that there's a ghost here, which, quite frankly, I find absurd,” he addressed the pile of books, for lack of better focal point. “I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for what's been going on in this flat. But if you are, in fact, a ghost, feel free to, um... give me a sign, or... something.” 

The room remained silent and still. John let out a puff of breath he hadn't noticed he was holding, and turned away to step into the kitchen. 

The corner of something hard smacked between his shoulder blades and thumped to the floor behind him. 

“Ow!” he spun around to find that the book that had been at the top of the stack was now lying on the floor, on the threshold between the sitting room and the kitchen, as if it had been hurled at him. “That hurt, you know,” he snapped at the empty room. “And it wasn't very nice. It's not as if I've done anything to you!” 

John realised that he was berating a stack of books in an otherwise uninhabited room, and frowned. He closed his eyes, lifting a hand to rub the bridge of his nose as he considered his situation. 

“All right,” he finally sighed, opening his eyes again. “Okay. Um, so you may or may not be a ghost. And on the off chance that you are a ghost and can hear me, I'm just going to talk to you a little, okay?” John felt patently ridiculous carrying on a one-sided conversation with thin air, but in the end, he supposed he could talk to nothingness in his own flat if he damn well pleased. He retrieved his book from the floor and returned it to its proper spot on the bookcase. 

“Um... Mrs. Hudson says your name was... er... is... Sherlock. If you're who she thinks you are, that is.” He approached the column of books and stared up toward the ceiling. The top book was beyond his reach. “You know, if you were polite, you'd put these back and not make me topple the whole thing over.” 

He could have sworn he heard a sniff of disdainful laughter before the entire stack wobbled and leaned precariously toward him. John threw his arms up over his head just as the tower tottered and collapsed and rained books down painfully over his arms and shoulders. “That was not helpful, you tosser,” John grumbled as he surveyed the resulting mess. 

It took half an hour to get the books sorted, with John grumbling under his breath all the while about how he'd prefer if someone paid half the rent if they were going to be mucking things up in the flat all the time. Twice, a book flew off the shelf as soon as John had put it away. Eventually, though, he managed to get everything cleaned up and make himself a cup of tea. He settled into his armchair, frowning into empty space. 

“Clearly, we need to come to an understanding, whatever you are... um... Sherlock,” he addressed the room and whatever might be listening. “Mrs. Hudson says you've managed to drive off all of her renters these past couple of years. She talks about you like she cared about you, and I don't think you're doing her a very good turn by making things difficult on her. And also, I rather like this flat, and Mrs. Hudson, so I'm not leaving, and you might as well stop throwing my things.” 

The empty armchair across from John skidded backward across the floor a good six inches. John rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. When he glanced back at the chair, he startled in his seat, spilling half of his hot tea over his lap. A man sat across from him, dressed in a tailored black suit, legs crossed, elbows propped on the arms of the chair, fingers steepled under his chin. From beneath a mop of dark curls, pale blue eyes fixed John with a sharp stare. John couldn't help but notice that the man didn't quite succeed in appearing completely opaque. 

John cleared his throat. “Ah... Sherlock?”

 

* * *

 


	2. Sherlock Is Bored

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John tries to find less destructive activities to keep his resident ghost entertained.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finished this one a bit earlier than promised. Probably another week before Chapter 3 (unless I get lucky and finish it early like I did with this one). Thanks for reading! Enjoy!

* * *

 

“Doctor Watson,” the apparition greeted John in a flat, solemn tone. “When you go out, could you pick me up some test tubes and a test tube rack? I think Mrs. Hudson threw mine out some time ago.” 

John paused in the midst of blotting tea from his lap with his napkin, and stared at the ghost. “I'm sorry, did you just spend the morning wrecking my flat and then appear in my sitting room and ask me to run an errand for you? And on top of that, to buy you things with my own money, that you, being a ghost or spirit or whatever, could not possibly need?” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of his bedroom, wondering if he might still be asleep. 

“You're not dreaming, Doctor, no matter how much you think you might like to be,” the ghost waved a hand dismissively. “I really don't know why you'd want to be; isn't this much more interesting?” 

“Interesting, yes, that's a good word for it. So, you know I'm a doctor. Been listening in on conversations, I suppose?” John shook his head, feeling a bit light-headed from the sheer surreality of his situation. 

Sherlock's eyes narrowed, zeroing in on John. “I know you have prior military experience and were wounded in action. Shot in the left shoulder. You used to walk with a limp; turned out to be psychosomatic. You're fine now, but you worry about it coming back. You're a doctor, GP these days, and doing well at it, but you find it all a bit dull. You saw your brother for dinner on Thursday, but your relationship is strained and you only went out of a sense of familial duty... well, and to check that he's not back to drinking.” 

John looked away, placing his tea cup on the table next to his chair. “I've lived here a week. How could you possibly know all of that?” 

“A week is more than ample time to observe someone as boring and simple as you,” the ghost rolled his eyes and wrinkled his nose. “Still not as dull as the last tenant, though that's not really saying much, seeing as she was a middle-aged accountant whose only hobby was covering every available surface with her hideous knitting.” 

“How long before you ran her off, then?” John asked, forcing a tight smile. 

Sherlock smirked, pleased with himself. “Three weeks.” 

John scowled. 

The ghost's face fell. “What?” 

“Mrs. Hudson's a good person, Sherlock,” John scolded the ghost, pointing a finger at him. “She deserves better than to have you up here causing trouble and chasing off tenants. The rent is her income, you know. Are you happy with yourself, making her struggle financially so that you don't have to share your precious flat? Can't you just... move on, or cross over, or whatever it is you're supposed to do?” 

“I should have known I couldn't expect an idiot like you to draw the correct conclusion,” the apparition spat, his face scrunching up in disdainful anger. “It's lucky I won't have to put up with your stupidity for more than another two or three weeks. You might as well go start packing now. Better yet, I'll help you.” 

Before John could respond, the ghost vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. 

A moment later, John heard a loud thump and rustling coming from the bedroom. He leapt from his chair and ran through the kitchen to go investigate. Just as he reached the hallway, his bedroom door flung itself open, banging against the wall, and his entire wardrobe, still on the hangers, flung itself through the doorway and hurled itself against John. He tripped over himself and landed hard on the floor of the hallway, covered in a substantial heap of jeans and shirts and jumpers.

 

* * *

 

On Monday, John came home from work to find the down filling from his pillows strewn throughout the flat. 

On Tuesday, John woke up and went to make his breakfast, only to find the eggs missing from the refrigerator. He found them twenty minutes later when he sat down on the sofa and felt them crunch where they were stashed behind a throw pillow. 

On Wednesday, there was a bad storm while John was at work. When he got home, he found that all of the windows in the flat had been opened to allow the torrential rain to pour in from outside. 

“Sherlock!” John yelled as he mopped up the puddles in the sitting room. “Sherlock, I know your transparent arse is lurking around here somewhere, and I know you can hear me. For the record, you're not making me want to move out. You're making me want to hire someone to exorcise you! Mrs. Hudson would thank me, you know!” 

John heard an indignant huff behind him, and he looked over his shoulder to see Sherlock's transparent form sprawled across the length of the sofa in pyjamas and a blue dressing gown. “Oh, a ghost who changes clothes? I'm pleased to know your repertoire of tricks extends beyond throwing temper tantrums.” 

“Can't you stop being tedious and just leave?” Sherlock demanded. “Take your boring military tidiness and boring books and boring jumpers and go live in some other flat.” 

“My military tidiness doesn't get a chance to be boring, because you're always making messes of everything,” John snapped, shaking a handful of wet towel in Sherlock's direction. “And I happen to like it here, and I am not leaving.” 

Sherlock sat upright on the sofa, narrowing his eyes to glare at John. “You don't like it here! How can you? I haven't given you a chance to like it here and I don't intend- Oh!” His blue eyes widened with sudden revelation. 

John dropped his wet towel into a laundry bag with the others he had used while he was cleaning up. “What?” 

“This is the only interesting thing that happens to you,” Sherlock observed. He leaned back against the cushions, closed his eyes, and steepled his fingers under his chin, looking smug. 

John pointedly ignored the ghost, finished cleaning up the mess in his flat, and went about making dinner. 

Sherlock refused to vanish for the entire rest of the evening. He spent the entire time lounging at one end of the sofa, apparently deep in thought, with his knees drawn up in front of him. 

“Um, well, good night, Sherlock,” John said when he snapped his laptop shut and prepared to turn in. 

The ghost didn't answer. 

Late in the night, John woke to the tortured screeching of a violin.

 

* * *

 

“I don't think he's angry. I think he's bored,” John told Mrs. Hudson over a cuppa, after work on Thursday evening. 

“How can he be bored? He's, well... you know.” Her voice dropped to a whisper and she leaned forward over her mug. “Dead.” 

John considered for a few minutes as he sipped his tea. “Well, the first thing he said to me was to demand that I go buy him some test tubes, and he seems to spend all of his time going through my things and analysing everything. What is it you said he did, um, before?” 

The landlady shrugged and rubbed at a spot of flour on the sleeve of her purple dress. “He did all sorts of experiments in the kitchen, and he did a bit of detective work for a lark. He was always scouring the newspapers for crimes and things.” 

“I don't suppose you have any recent newspapers around, then?” John asked. 

“Actually, I have the papers from the last couple of days in the other room. Let me just fetch them for you.” She rose and left the room, and returned a couple of minutes later with three newspapers. “Do you really think this is going to help?” 

John took the papers from her and glanced over a few of the headlines as he stood up. “I really don't know, but it's all I can think of to stop him destroying everything in the flat.” 

When John went upstairs, all was quiet. “Sherlock?” he called out, moving through the sitting room and kitchen to peer into the rooms down the hall. “Sherlock? Come on, I know you can hear me... probably invisibly floating around on my bathroom ceiling or something.” 

The ghost, however, didn't seem inclined to appear. John returned to the kitchen and spread out the newspapers on the kitchen table. “Well, I brought you something. Picked these up from Mrs. Hudson.”

 

* * *

 

When he woke the next morning, John saw that the papers were gone from the kitchen table. He made a cup of coffee and wandered into the sitting room, where the papers were spread open across both of the armchairs, and riddled with holes where articles and headlines had been snipped out. A pair of scissors was stabbed into the wall over the sofa, next to a collage of the newspaper clippings, pages printed out from the internet, and yellow sticky notes scrawled upon in red pen. John's laptop lay open on the sofa. Floating in mid-air, on his back, obstructing the doorway out to the stairs, was Sherlock. He was in his customary blue dressing gown, staring at the ceiling. 

“Got some use out of the newspapers, then?” John asked, crossing the room to examine the sticky notes on the wall. 

“Obviously,” the ghost huffed. 

John smiled without looking away from the wall. “Mrs. Hudson says you used to help out some officer at the Yard. So what were you, then? Some sort of... consultant?” 

“Close,” Sherlock replied, sounding both smug and pleased in equal measure. He shifted into a sitting position, but apparently couldn't be bothered to do so on a piece of furniture rather than floating in front of the door. “When we met, I told you about your limp, and your military service, and your brother. You seemed surprised.” 

“Yes, how did you know?” John asked, turning away from the wall and seating himself on the sofa instead. 

“I didn't know, I noticed,” Sherlock corrected. “Walking stick in the back of your closet. It's used, not new, so you needed it before, but you don't need it now. But it's shoved into the furthest corner of the closet, like you don't want to be reminded of it. The fact that you ever needed it at all embarrassed you, then. Yet you don't just throw it out, as if you're afraid you might need it again. Your military background was easy; the way you walk, the way you make your bed, the way you press your shirts, the old tan lines around your wrists and neck that have faded but not entirely disappeared. And of course the scar on your shoulder, which I noticed while you were in the shower-” 

“Sherlock!” John interrupted, “Ghost or not, you could at least have the courtesy not to spy on me in the shower!” 

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “I was hardly spying. I was already in there and you just barged in and started washing yourself. It's not my problem if you didn't see me. I merely took the opportunity to observe. Anyway, the scar is clearly a bullet wound. Man of your age with prior military service, wounded in action is likely, probably Afghanistan or Iraq. As for you being a doctor, I could have figured that one out even if I hadn't heard you telling Mrs. Hudson the day you moved in. And then your brother... the calendar in the kitchen has 'Harry' written in on every other Thursday. There's a Harry Watson in your phone contacts, but you usually ignore his calls. You don't want to talk to him, but you keep up appearances by going to a regularly scheduled dinner. Last week, you were on your laptop, searching for places to eat that don't serve alcohol, but you keep beer in the refrigerator. Concerned for someone else, then; the person you meet regularly, your brother. Obvious.” 

“That... was amazing,” John breathed. 

The ghost reclined across the doorway again, looking puzzled. “Do you think so?” 

John nodded. “Of course it was, it was extraordinary. It was quite extraordinary.” 

“That isn't what people used to say,” he replied, steepling his fingers under his chin and closing his eyes. 

“What did people say?” John asked, taking a long swallow from his long forgotten, lukewarm coffee. 

Sherlock smirked. “'Piss off.'” He paused. “Did I get anything wrong?” 

“I was invalided home from Afghanistan a couple of years ago,” John confirmed, “Shot in the shoulder, as you said. The leg was psychosomatic. Walked with that bloody stick for a good year after I got home. General practice can't help but be dull after being in a war zone, but it's dependable work. I see Harry every two weeks, just as you said, but we really don't get on. Never have.” 

The ghost looked surprised. “Spot on, then. I didn't expect to be right about everything.” 

John chuckled. “'Harry' is short for 'Harriet.'” 

“Harry's your sister.” Sherlock grimaced at the ceiling in frustration. “A sister! There's always something.” 

John laughed again and checked his watch. “Oh, bugger, I'm going to be late!” He drained the rest of his coffee and hurriedly dressed for work. A few minutes later, he was snatching his jacket from the hook by the door and shrugging into it. 

“Ah, Sherlock, would you mind, um, floating a bit to the side rather than right across the door?” John asked, gesturing to the corner, where Sherlock would be out of the way. 

“Why?” the ghost asked in a bored tone. “Just walk through.” 

John cleared his throat. “I'd really rather not.” 

Sherlock opened one eye and gave John a mocking grin. “You did when you came up from Mrs. Hudson's last night. You just didn't see me.” 

“Well, I can see you now, and I'd rather not walk right through you, so if you could please move, I'd appreciate it,” John insisted. 

“I didn't realise there were social conventions for living with non-corporeal beings,” Sherlock snapped, adamantly refusing to float out of the way, “And now that I know, I can't begin to describe to you how much I don't care.” 

John clenched his jaw, spun on his heel, and went out the door from the kitchen instead. As he reached the landing on the stairs, Sherlock's voice wafted down to him. 

“Bring home more newspapers, John!”

 

* * *

 

John bought four more newspapers on his way home from work, muttering to himself the whole time about how cracked he must be to bring home gifts for a ghost. As he was walking up to the front door of 221, newspapers in one hand and keys in the other, a police car pulled up to the kerb and a silver-haired officer stepped out. 

“May I help you?” John asked, bewildered. 

“Detective Inspector Lestrade,” the man introduced himself, flashing his badge. “Are you Doctor John Watson?” 

John felt a flash of alarm and confusion as he tried to discern why on earth a detective inspector was stopping him as he arrived home from work. “Yes, that's me. What can I help you with?” 

“Well, I'm very interested to know why I got an email this morning from a doctor who apparently has a lot of information about several apparently unrelated crimes.” Lestrade looked down at the pavement. “Information that hasn't been made public. And this doctor was gracious enough to offer a few leads and then call me and my team complete idiots. I got even more interested when I did a little digging and found out that this doctor happens to have just moved into a flat where... where an old acquaintance of mine used to live.”

 

* * *

 


	3. Consulting Detective (Deceased)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lestrade has to start believing in spooks, and Sherlock is happy to find himself back on the job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it's sort of late-ish on Monday, but I did promise a chapter and here it is. I've been a bit ill, so I didn't get to finish early like I had hoped. Anyway, enjoy! (And as always, you are welcome to come stalk on [tumblr](http://bbcatemysoul.tumblr.com).)

* * *

 

John gaped stupidly at the detective inspector for several seconds before stammering out, “I- uh, there must be some mistake. I haven't sent any emails to...” his shoulders sagged and he heaved a put-upon sigh as the realization hit him. “Sherlock,” he muttered under his breath. 

Lestrade shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “So you knew him? Have to admit, I'm a bit surprised. He wasn't exactly the sort for friends. Thought I just about knew everyone he associated with. And I think he might have mentioned someone who did, well, the same thing he did.” 

“Well, no, I didn't know him when he was-” John cut himself off before he could say something completely unbelievable, and shook his head. “Look, Detective Inspector, it's a bit of a long story, but I didn't send that email.” 

“Well, it came from your email account, didn't it? You can come tell your 'long story' down at the Yard, if you like,” Lestrade offered, with a smile that didn't make it to his tired eyes. “I just want to know how you figured out all of those crimes. It's not like you've got anything to hide, is it?” 

John rubbed his hand across his forehead and looked away, watching cars pass along Baker Street for a few moments. Finally, he met the detective inspector's eyes. “I can explain, sort of. But I think you'd better come inside.” 

Lestrade warily followed John inside and up the stairs to the flat. As they entered, John noticed that the morning's collage had been torn off the wall and dumped in an unceremonious heap on the desk by the window. The scissors still protruded from the place on the wall where they had been stuck at some point in the night. All was quiet, but there was a chemical smell hanging in the air. 

John sniffed and turned toward the kitchen. A series of saucers was set out in a neat row on the kitchen table, each one labelled with a sticky note describing the puddle of household cleaners within. It appeared that there were clumps of fuzz floating around in the dishes. John clenched his jaw when he noticed one of his jumpers crumpled up on the seat of one of the kitchen chairs. 

“Sherlock!” John shouted, feeling a flush of anger rushing up his neck to his cheeks as he examined the remnant of navy blue wool, which now had several tattered holes in it, “Wherever you are, you better get into this kitchen and show yourself! You've got the police coming after me because of your stupid emails and I want to know what the bloody hell you've been doing to my jumper!” 

In the kitchen doorway, Lestrade stood frozen and wide-eyed for a long moment, listening to John vent his anger at a dead man. He cleared his throat. “Now, Doctor, if you just want to relax for a minute or two, it, ah, might be best if you take a ride with me down to the Yard, after all. Or maybe I can call for an ambulance for you-” 

“Oh shut up, Lestrade,” a disembodied baritone voice sounded from the hallway. A moment later, Sherlock glided in, appearing in his crisp black suit this time, and bearing two more of John's jumpers along with him. “John is perfectly healthy, why would he need an ambulance? Oh, John! You remembered the newspapers,” the ghost observed gleefully. 

“Sherlock, _shut up_ a minute, will you?” John hissed, guiding a thunderstruck Lestrade into one of the kitchen chairs. “And whatever you're planning on doing with those jumpers, _don't_.” 

Lestrade had leaned forward to put his head between his knees, but after a minute, he looked up, his brown eyes as wide as dinner plates. His gaze darted from Sherlock to John, and back to Sherlock again. His mouth opened and worked wordlessly a couple of times, and then finally, he managed to choke out, in Sherlock's general direction, “You're _dead_.” 

“I see the Yard hasn't changed its official policy on stating the obvious,” the ghost complained in his usual bored tone as he relinquished the two jumpers to an indignant John. “What are you doing here, anyway? My email this morning hardly necessitated a personal visit.” He peered down at his saucers of household cleaners and fuzz and scowled. “Need a microscope,” he muttered. 

“You need to not send suspicious emails from my email account, and not take my things without asking and then destroy them,” John chastised, disappearing down the hall momentarily to shove his stolen clothes back into his bedroom. 

Sherlock sneered and hovered near the still-disbelieving detective inspector. “Suspicious emails? Come on, Lestrade, you can't have thought John Watson, unassuming physician, was some criminal mastermind sending you all the details of his latest exploits.” 

“Well, I didn't know what to think, did I?” Lestrade exploded, pushing himself out of his chair and taking a step away from the approaching spirit. “I don't really expect my dead frie- a dead consulting detective to start hacking some poor sod's email in order to solve crimes from beyond the grave, do I? Doesn't really happen every day, does it?” He wheeled on John as the doctor reappeared from the hallway. “And how are _you_ so bloody calm about it?” 

John chuckled as he flipped on the kettle and pulled down a pair of teacups. “Not much else I can do. There aren't many exorcists in the phone book.” He shot Sherlock a glance. “But I might start looking harder if I find any more of my clothes torn apart for amateur chemistry experiments.” 

“I did that jumper a favour,” Sherlock gritted out, “and I might not have needed to if you would make the least effort to not be so _boring_!” The ghost vanished in a tantrum. 

“Where did he go?” Lestrade asked, voice lowered, as he craned his neck to look around the kitchen and through the doorway to the sitting room. 

John shrugged as he poured the tea. “Floating around somewhere. He gets dramatic when he's in a strop.” Down the hall, it sounded like the shower curtain was being torn off its hooks. 

“Well, it's nice to know he hasn't changed,” Lestrade observed, accepting his tea from John. 

Gingerly pushing Sherlock's experiments aside, John sat down in the chair across from the detective inspector and took a sip of his tea. “Look, um, Mrs. Hudson tells me Sherlock used to work with you. You know, when he was alive.” 

Lestrade nodded. “Yeah, not officially or anything, but he consulted on some tough cases. Preferred the murders, especially weird ones. Really had a knack for figuring things out whenever my team hit a dead end.” 

“Everything's a dead end when your team is blind and incompetent,” Sherlock's voice wafted in from some indeterminate direction, but the spirit didn't reappear. 

John smiled at Lestrade apologetically, but otherwise ignored the ghost. “I don't suppose you've got anything that might help keep him busy and out of trouble?” 

The detective inspector stared into his tea thoughtfully. “Well, I can take a look and see what I can dig up. At the very least, it can't hurt to give him a couple of cold case files to puzzle over.”

 

* * *

 

Later that evening, John was settled comfortably in his arm chair with a book, the telly on next to him with the volume on low. Sherlock was ensconced, cross-legged in his pyjamas and dressing gown on the sofa, surrounded by the fresh supply of newspapers John had brought home from work, highlighting things and clipping bits out. 

“Why did you do that today?” Sherlock's voice interrupted John from his crime novel. 

John glanced up from his book and saw Sherlock examining him from across the room. “Why did I do what?” 

“You asked Lestrade for work for me,” the ghost reminded him. “Why?” 

“Because I can't afford new bedding and new clothes and new groceries every time you get bored,” John chuckled, marking his page with his finger and letting the book fall closed. “It's been two weeks and you've already destroyed four pillows, a jumper, a dozen eggs, and several dinners. Oh, and now a shower curtain.” 

“Yes, but other people move out; they don't go getting me work from Scotland Yard,” Sherlock persisted, tossing aside one newspaper and taking up another. 

“Do you intend to go on breaking things until I leave, no matter what I do?” John asked curiously. 

Sherlock was silent for a long time, perusing his newspaper intently. After several minutes, John returned to his book. He had read several pages before Sherlock interrupted him again. 

“No, I wouldn't mind if you stayed,” the ghost answered decisively, as if there hadn't been a twenty-minute-long gap in the conversation. “You're not quite as tedious as the average person, and if you leave, god knows what sort of moron I'll get next.” 

John smiled at the backward compliment. He rose from his chair and went down the hall to his bedroom closet, returning a few minutes later with an empty file box. “You're making a mess,” he observed, “and you already made a mess with your notes from those cases you were working on last night. If you're going to be working, we should keep this stuff organized.” 

“Dull,” Sherlock sighed without looking up. 

“Well, then, for my sanity, I'm going to keep it organized so that your mess of clippings and printouts and notes doesn't drive me mad,” John insisted, beginning to sort through the pile of things on the desk from the previous night's work. 

John thought he caught the barest hint of a smile playing around the corner of Sherlock's mouth before the ghost stifled it commandeered John's laptop.

 

* * *

 

With Sherlock occupied, John enjoyed a relatively uneventful weekend, even if he did feel a bit as though he were taking on secretarial duties for his dead flatmate. 

On Sunday, true to his word, Lestrade stopped by with a short stack of cold case files, promising a few more whenever Sherlock finished with them. 

Monday evening, John sat down to write a blog entry for the first time in a while. 

“How you finish typing anything at that pace is beyond me,” Sherlock criticized from where he floated lazily in front of the window. “What are you writing?” 

“Telling stories,” John answered distractedly. “Ghost stories.” 

“You're writing about me,” the ghost immediately concluded. “Why would you want to write about me? People will think you've lost your mind. Not that I care what those idiots think; but you do.” 

“People will think it's fiction, because that's what I'm telling them,” John corrected, continuing to peck away slowly with two fingers. 

“Hm,” Sherlock assented, turning his attention back to whatever he found so fascinating about the curtains. 

A while later, as John finished up his blog entry and prepared to turn in, Sherlock broke from his reverie and spoke again. 

“I need some lab equipment,” he announced. “There are aspects of this case that require experimentation in order to draw any firm conclusions. I'll leave you a list in the morning, John.” 

John closed his laptop and set it aside before rising from his arm chair and stretching. “Sherlock, I'm not going to go spend a small fortune on lab equipment that I won't even be using, and I wouldn't know where to get most of it even if I wanted to.” 

“Nonsense,” Sherlock dismissed the protests. “There was a woman at Bart's, down at the morgue, who used to look the other way when I needed to borrow things. She may still be there. I'll leave you a list.” 

“And if she's still there, what am I supposed to say to her?” John demanded. “'Hello, my flat is haunted by a bloke who used to come steal things from you, do you mind if I just pick up where he left off?' Somehow, I don't think that's going to go over well, Sherlock.” 

“Oh, I'm sure you'll figure something out,” the ghost insisted as he floated down the hall, following John to the bedroom. “Wink at her or whatever it is you do. Be resourceful. I'll put the list next to your keys.”

 

* * *

 


	4. Shopping List

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock is demanding, and John runs an errand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one took so long, guys! The last couple of weeks have been rough ones for writing, and I've got several projects in progress. But I've already started on the next chapter, so that will be coming soon!

* * *

 

When John woke in the morning, there was, as promised, a neatly-written list of desired lab equipment for John to procure, lying on the kitchen table with John's keys on top of it so that it wouldn't be missed. 

A very long list. 

It was, in fact, a two-page spreadsheet detailing the names of the items, the exact specifications required, and the quantity desired. Added to the bottom of the second page, scrawled in large letters and underlined three times, was the note, “As many human kidneys as you can get.” 

John dropped the list back on the table and switched on the kettle. “Sherlock,” he called as he went about making his breakfast. “Come on, you spectral pain in the arse, we need to talk about your shopping list.” 

Sherlock floated in from the direction of the bedroom, looking annoyed, as though John had interrupted him from something important. “What about it?” 

John narrowed his eyes suspiciously at the ghost. “Did you just come from my bedroom?” 

“Well, to be fair, John, it was _my_ bedroom first,” Sherlock retorted. 

“You're not exactly needing it these days, though, are you?” he asked, cracking two eggs into a pan. “It's not as though you sleep. What could you possibly need to do in there while _I'm_ sleeping?” 

Sherlock shrugged. “I was thinking. Anyway, the list. You're a medical man, John; I had assumed you would at least be familiar with everything I need.” 

“Yes, thank you, Sherlock, for acknowledging that there's some possibility of me being competent in my field,” John laughed as he flipped his eggs and put two slices of bread into the toaster. “In fact, I'm competent enough to know that you are asking me to walk out of a hospital with a few thousand pounds' worth of equipment!” 

The ghost floated closer and scowled down at John's sizzling eggs as if they had committed a personal affront. “When you consider how much money the hospital spends in an average year, the few thousand pounds' worth of equipment that I'll be using is practically nothing.” 

John pulled the pan off the stove and scooped his eggs onto a plate. “No, Sherlock. I am not _stealing_ things for you, not from a hospital or from anywhere else.” 

“Well, then, I'll just have to order what I need. I can get everything on the Internet. You can just worry about getting me the kidneys.” Sherlock perched himself on the counter, right on top of John's breakfast plate, looking very satisfied with his proposed solution. 

“Sherlock!” John snapped in exasperation, “Would you mind not sitting in my food, please? And where do you propose to get the money for your little shopping spree? Oh... oooh, no. You are _not_ using my card to turn this flat into your own personal lab. Forget you even thought of it.” 

“I need equipment!” Sherlock insisted. “The kidneys do no good if I can't perform the necessary experiments. And if you want your breakfast, you can just _reach through_. Even with your dismal powers of observation, you may have noticed that I am not, in fact, a solid object.” 

Gritting his teeth, John reached into the space where Sherlock's ghostly hips were seated, grabbed his plate, and quickly retreated toward the toaster to retrieve his toast. He studiously ignored the triumphant look on Sherlock's face. “Why can't you just accept the fact that I don't want to have to reach through you, or walk through you, or whatever? It makes me a little uncomfortable.” 

“Yes, but why? It's completely irrational,” Sherlock argued as John sat himself down at the kitchen table and began eating his breakfast. “Now, the lab equipment, John. You may as well say yes. It's not as though you can keep tabs on your wallet all the time. As you yourself said, I don't sleep.” 

John leaned back in his chair and covered his face with his hands. “I'm not made of unlimited money, Sherlock. You can't just take my card and go shopping. Is this what you did when you were alive? Throw temper tantrums, spend other people's money, and fill up the refrigerator with human kidneys?” 

Sherlock smirked and floated down from his perch on the counter. “More or less. But I mostly spent my brother's money. He would have just wasted it all on pudding, anyway.” 

“Well... maybe we should invite your brother over for a visit,” John suggested as he cleared away his dishes. 

“Mycroft?! I'd really prefer 'we' didn't,” Sherlock resisted, wrinkling his nose in displeasure. “He's rather intolerable.” 

John chuckled, “Oh, family trait, then?” 

Sherlock scowled. 

“Oh, come on, don't go vanishing and breaking things,” John coaxed, “But I'm not financing your hobby, so you can either play nice with your brother, or do without.”

 

* * *

 

John couldn't for the life of him figure out why he agreed to go to the morgue and see some woman about a cooler-full of kidneys. Nevertheless, after his shift at the clinic, he found himself stepping out of a cab at Bart's and making his way to the morgue, where this Molly Hooper person apparently still worked. 

The morgue, unfortunately, was empty, but on his way back out of the building, John ran into an old mate, Mike Stamford, who helped him track Molly down in one of the labs. 

When John saw Molly, he was inclined to forgive Sherlock for sending him on this errand. She was, granted, a bit timid and mousy, but attractive enough in a girl-next-door sort of way. John gave her his most winning smile as he followed Mike into the lab. 

“Molly,” Mike called out jovially, startling Molly from her work and causing her pipette to slip out of her gloved hand and clatter to the table in front of her. “I'm off home, but here's an old friend of mine, John Watson. He was asking for you.” 

Molly looked understandably perplexed, but Mike was in too much of a hurry to get home, to give her much notice. “Oh, um... okay,” she answered the back of Mike's head with a hesitant smile as he escaped back out of the lab. She turned to John. “Sorry, was there something I can help you with, or...?” 

“Er, yes, actually, I think,” John replied, trying to figure out the best way to go about this whole business. “It's actually a bit hard to believe. You wouldn't happen to- I mean, I'm not delaying you from finishing up and going home, or anything, am I?” 

“Oh, um, no, I've still got plenty of work left,” she shook her head, ponytail swaying, as she retrieved her fallen pipette and resumed what she had been doing. “I mean- you're not disrupting me or anything, not really.” 

John nodded once and cleared his throat. “Um, good. Well, then. Listen, do you believe in ghosts?” Straight to the point was probably best, John thought. Worst case, he could at least be done with this whole thing as quickly as possible. 

“Ghosts? I don't think so. I mean, not really. I mean, I haven't ever had any angry spirits burst into the morgue and ask me to stop cutting up their bodies, or anything!” She laughed nervously at her own joke for a moment, before her face abruptly straightened. “I mean- I'm sorry! Morgue humour, you know.” 

“Um, right,” John chuckled, beginning to feel distinctly awkward. “Well, I really didn't believe in them, either, until I moved into my new flat, and, as ridiculous as I know this is going to sound... The place is haunted by a ghost who says he knew you.” 

Molly looked up from her work again, glancing around the room uncertainly, as if looking for an escape route that _didn't_ take her right past John. “I'm sorry, a- a ghost who claims he knew me?” 

And here it comes, John thought. He took a deep breath. “His name was- er, is- Sherlock Holmes.” 

The pipette clattered to the table again, and Molly turned away from her work, seemingly making a great effort to draw herself up and square her shoulders. “Listen, um-” she blinked a few times, as though trying to remember what his name was, and failing. “Well, anyway, listen. Sherlock was a friend of mine. Sort of. And two years ago, I had to do his post-mortem. The way I found out he died was seeing him turn up in my morgue, and I really don't think this is very funny.” The willpower involved in being assertive seemed to sap her strength, and her shoulders slumped as her narrow mouth began to quiver. 

“No, no. NO,” John reached out a hand toward her, but she shied away, sidestepping around him on her way to the door. “I agree, this isn't funny, and I promise you, as completely bonkers as this sounds, I am _not_ joking. Honestly, I didn't even want to come down here and bother you, because believe it or not, making myself look insane is not my idea of a fun after-work outing. But he is very stubborn, and apparently very bored, and he is very destructive when he doesn't get his way, so please, if you could just hear me out for a few minutes... And if you want to stay right there by the door so you can make an easy escape when I sound like a complete lunatic, I won't be offended.” 

Molly did stop, wringing her hands and shifting from foot to foot, indecision written all over her face. “So, um... what did he send you here for? I can't imagine any reason why he should think of me. Especially from 'beyond the grave.'” 

John frowned. “Well, he doesn't seem to have been friends with many people. In any case, he sent me to ask you if you could pack up some kidneys for him.” 

“Kidneys.” Molly stared at John blankly. “I'm sorry, are you- Do you realize that what you've just said is that Sherlock Holmes is haunting your flat and sent you here to pick him up some kidneys?” 

“Yes,” John answered, chuckling as the full absurdity of the situation began to hit him. “And really, the fewer times we repeat it, the better, I think. I'd rather not spend too much time thinking about how I'm running errands for the world's only consulting poltergeist.” 

Molly began to peel off her gloves to chuck them in the bin. “I don't suppose he told you tell me 'hello' or anything?” she asked, perking up hopefully as she finally met John's eyes for the first time. Something in his face must have betrayed the answer, though, because her face immediately fell again. “No, of course he didn't. He wouldn't, would he? You know, for some reason, I'm almost starting to believe you. Wait here; I'll get you those kidneys.” 

John leaned against the edge of a table, drumming his fingers on the surface as he waited for Molly to return. She did, soon enough, standing as far away from him as she could while she passed him a small cooler. 

“There's four in there. You'll probably want to be discreet, you know, taking it out of the building,” she advised. “This sort of thing is a bit frowned-upon.” 

“I'm sure Sherlock will appreciate it,” John shifted the cooler in his grasp and headed for the door. He paused on the threshold and looked back. “Look, um, I don't suppose you're free for dinner sometime?” 

Molly stopped in the middle of putting on a fresh pair of gloves and gave him a deer-in-the-headlights stare. “Me? Um, dinner?” She gave herself a shake. “Um, I'm sorry, but... I'm sure you're very nice- I mean, you seem nice and all, but- but you approach strangers in order to fetch body parts for your ghost.” 

“Right. Fair point, I suppose. Well, good night, then.” John stepped out into the corridor and did his best to escape the building without drawing attention to his parcel. 

 

* * *

 

It had begun to grow dark by the time John exited the hospital, and after a full day at work and a frankly bizarre errand, he was more than ready to get home and have his dinner. He was not in any state of mind to notice anyone who might be loitering in the shadows outside the doors. 

“Doctor Watson,” a pretentious, artificially polite voice sounded behind him. 

Turning, John saw a tall, grave gentleman in a grey pinstripe suit, face half obscured in the gathering shadows, leaning casually on his black umbrella. 

John shifted the cooler in his hands, tucking it under one arm. “Have we met?” 

“No,” the man replied smoothly. “But as you seem to be making the acquaintance of everyone else associated with Sherlock Holmes, I thought I might introduce myself.” 

Whatever John had expected, that was not it. The cooler almost slipped from is grasp in his moment of surprise. His grip on the box tightened and he raised his chin. “Well, you haven't exactly done a very good job of 'introducing yourself,' since you seem to know my name, but haven't given me yours.” 

“What is your interest in Sherlock Holmes?” the stranger asked, as if John hadn't spoken. 

John clenched his jaw in annoyance. “Aside from the fact that I live in the flat where he died?” John could have sworn he saw the stranger flinch at that, but in the dark, it was hard to tell. “I don't have one.” 

The man poked the metal tip of his umbrella at some invisible point on the ground. “And yet, you've lived in his flat for two weeks, and in the last few days, you've managed to make the acquaintance of all of his friends.” 

A sigh of exasperation escaped John's lips and he rolled his eyes. “All of his friends? I've met two people!” 

“When one considers Sherlock, it's really a wonder he had so many, is it not?” A cynical smile spread on the stranger's face, and John found it really rather creepy. 

Something in the man's criticism made John bristle. “Look, I don't know who you are, and I really don't care, but I can tell you that where I live and who I associate with isn't any of your business.” 

The man's forced smile fell away. “It could be.” 

“It _really_ couldn't,” John insisted, drawing himself up and squaring his shoulders as he turned his back on his interrogator and began to walk away. 

He only got about three paces before the haughty voice stopped him again. 

“Difficult having to start all over again after Mary, isn't it?” the stranger remarked casually. “You were just starting to feel 'normal' again after returning from the war... you even purchased a ring. Devastating finding out she had other ideas, wasn't it? Almost enough to make you want to forget your own mundane life and become obsessed with someone else's more interesting one.” 

John gripped his cooler until his knuckles turned white. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded. 

“A concerned party,” the stranger hedged. 

“Well, I'm not interested in your concern,” John retorted, struggling to keep his voice steady in an attempt to hide that he'd been caught off guard. 

“You're not the one I'm concerned for. Unfortunately, the one I _am_ concerned for is no longer in a position to appreciate it.” The man pursed his lips for a moment, a wistful expression flickering across his face. “Not that he ever did, anyway.” 

John stared the man down, as much as he could in the shadows cast by the street lamps. Something suddenly clicked inside John's brain, and his shoulders slumped a bit as tension drained from him, leaving mainly annoyance and exasperation. “You're the brother. You're, um, Mycroft, was it?” 

The stranger looked stupefied. “I beg your pardon?” 

“You could have just introduced yourself, you know. Like a normal person.” John chuckled. “Incidentally, you're just the person I needed to see. Your brother is haunting my flat and threatening to spend all of my money on lab supplies.”

 

* * *

 


	5. Mycroft Visits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John enjoys having Sherlock to be irritated with. Sherlock enjoys having Mycroft to resent. Mycroft enjoys having other people's business to meddle in. All is right with the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, kind people! I apologize in advance for a wee bit of brotherly Mycroft angst. Enjoy!

* * *

 

“I can't believe you invited Mycroft over!” Sherlock snapped from where he lay sulking, facing the back of the sofa. 

Walking into the sitting room from the kitchen, where he had been rearranging the contents of the refrigerator to accommodate a couple of plates of human kidneys, John sank down into his chair and picked up his book. “He only stayed twenty minutes, Sherlock. He was hardly going to accept the word of a complete stranger without actually seeing you for himself. Besides, it gave you an opportunity to float in here with a bed sheet draped over you like something out of a cheap black-and-white horror film.” 

Sherlock turned to face John and sat up, smirking. “I got the idea from one of the previous tenants.” 

“All right, well, now you have your kidneys, and Mycroft is going to come by tomorrow with a card for the new bank account, and a phone for you, so that you can text Lestrade to your heart's content.” John looked up from thumbing through the pages of his novel and saw Sherlock eyeing him intently. “What?” 

“Why would Molly turn you down for a date?” Sherlock demanded. 

John's eyebrows shot toward his hairline. “ _How-_ Oh, never mind. She just wasn't interested, Sherlock.” 

“But why?” the ghost pressed. “You're personable, attractive, and have professional interests overlapping her own. Logically speaking, you're perfectly compatible. Why wouldn't she want to go out with you?” 

“She seemed to take issue with me having a Sherlock apparition for a flatmate,” John joked as he turned his attention back to his book and found the page where he had left off the evening before. “But, truth be told, I've never found dating and logic to have much to do with each other.” 

“Of course not,” Sherlock flicked a hand in a dismissive wave as he reclined on the sofa and turned his back to the room again. “Dating is nothing but a hormone-driven mating ritual, no different from that of any other animal species. Dull.” 

John tried unsuccessfully to stifle a laugh. “Didn't bother much with that sort of thing, then, did you? I thought maybe Molly had been your girlfr-” 

“What? _No._ Don't be absurd, John,” Sherlock protested without bothering to move even so much as to look over his shoulder. 

Letting his curiosity get the better of him, John pried a little further. “All right, so, you had a landlady, a brother you dislike, two friends-” 

“ _Colleagues_ ,” Sherlock corrected sharply. 

“Two _colleagues_ ,” John continued, ticking off the number on his fingers, “no girlfriend... uh, boyfriend?” 

“No.” Sherlock turned his head enough that John could see one blue eye. 

“And that's it? No one else? No one you were close to, no one you liked?” John frowned. 

Rolling onto his back with a put-upon huff, Sherlock turned his head to scowl at John properly. “Who else would there be? Lestrade let me in on cases, Molly gave me a lab in which to work and the occasional spare body part, Mrs. Hudson provided me with a flat. If I could have gotten those things on my own, I would have. Mycroft, I'm certain, would plague me with his presence no matter the circumstances.” 

“I see.” John felt his jaw clenching, and he took a deep breath before plunking his book down on the arm of his chair and standing up. “Well, I'm sorry you now have to suffer my company in exchange for using me to run errands for you and act as your liaison with the living.” He took his anger out on his coat, snatching it from its hook behind the door with rather more force than necessary. 

“Where are you going?” Sherlock demanded, sitting up once more and looking on in startled confusion as John moved toward the door. 

“Out,” John retorted, shrugging into his coat. “Somewhere ghost-free, preferably.” He let the door slam behind him. 

As he stepped out of the front door and onto the pavement, John silently bemoaned the inherent unfairness in not being able to seriously contemplate strangling one's flatmate because said flatmate was already a bloody ghost. A few steps later, he realised how ridiculous it was that he was fleeing his own flat, which he paid good money for, in order to avoid conflict with a dead man. By the time he was seated at the pub and nursing his beer, he was able to acknowledge just how surreal his life had become when the problem that had him drinking in a pub on a Tuesday evening was the insensitivity of the ghost residing in his flat.

* * *

 

It took John's blindly groping hand three attempts to silence the alarm in the morning. He shouldn't have stayed so long at the pub. He grunted and buried his face in the pillow, rapidly falling back asleep even as he told himself not to. 

“You'll be late for work if you don't get up,” Sherlock's deep voice sounded from the other side of the bed, nearly startling John out of his skin. 

“Jesus, Sherlock! You can't just- _wait_.” John fumbled to switch on the lamp and blinked in the sudden light. Stretched across the bed, perpendicular to John, with his feet sticking off the edge, Sherlock lounged in his thinking pose. The situation was not improved by John's awareness that he was lying through the middle of Sherlock's thighs. “ _What_ are you doing in my bed? And when I said I didn't want to reach through or walk through you, I assumed you would be able to generalize that bit of information enough to understand that I don't want to sleep in the middle of any part of you!” 

Sherlock looked affronted. “I was already here last night when you came in from the pub, and I wasn't even invisible, as you seemed to object to that in regards to the shower. Had you turned on the lamp before you proceeded to stumble in here and jostle everything about and then throw yourself right through the middle of me and start _snoring_ , you would have noticed. Possibly. You're not very observant.” 

The duvet had managed to form a twisted cocoon around John in the night, and he struggled to free himself of it while still maintaining an air of dignified disapproval. “You know, you might have spoken up when I 'threw myself right through the middle of you.'” 

Attention still fixed firmly on the ceiling, Sherlock raised an eyebrow. “It didn't bother me. Your snoring, however, tends to be quite distracting, particularly because you occasionally stop snoring and return to regular breathing, then resume snoring at completely unpredictable intervals. I did ask you to be quiet, but you didn't hear.” 

“You might have just gone into the other room to do your thinking,” John suggested as he finally succeeded in extricating both of his feet from the duvet and crossed the room to rummage through his closet for the day's clothes. “If my snoring bothers you so much, there's no need for you to lurk about _in my bed_ while I sleep. Did you make a habit of climbing in bed with all the other tenants, as well?” 

“Of course not!” Sherlock protested, his lip curling in distaste as though John had suggested inviting Mycroft move in with them. 

John laughed as he gathered up his clothes and prepared to head to the shower. “Oh, so I'm special, then?” 

That merited an affected eye-roll from Sherlock, who was now hovering a good foot and a half above the bed and still staring at the ceiling as though the hairline crack running across it was the most interesting thing in the universe. “You may want to put your bathrobe on, John. Mycroft has been in the sitting room for the last thirty-four minutes, presumably waiting to speak with you. Though I would forever cherish the look on his face if you chose to greet him in only those pants.”

* * *

 

The first thing John noticed when he emerged from the bedroom, having hurriedly donned the previous night's jeans and jumper, was the microscope and the vast, shining assortment of test tubes, beakers, Erlenmeyer flasks, pipettes, Petri dishes, and other accoutrements laid out neatly over the entire surface of the kitchen table. The second thing he noticed was the compact stack of boxes in the centre of the sitting room floor. The third thing was Mycroft, just as Sherlock had said. 

The elder Holmes brother was turned partly away from John, his gaze seemingly fixated on a spot on the floor in front of the far end of the sofa. John suspected he knew exactly what significance that bit of floor held, and exactly what unpleasant memory it recalled for Mycroft. 

“My brother always seemed in need of someone to protect him from himself,” Mycroft mused in his typical cool, polite tone, having heard John enter the room. “It is my deepest regret that I proved to be unequal to the task. And if I couldn't do it, I'm certain I don't know who could have. Perhaps some things can't be controlled, and some people can't be protected.” 

Unable to think of anything to say to that, John shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot before approaching the stack of boxes in the middle of the room and running a finger over Sherlock's name printed neatly on the flap. “May I?” 

“Certainly.” Mycroft sighed and turned his back on the offending floorboards, training his piercing Holmes gaze on John instead. 

John lifted the flaps of the rectangular box at the top of the pile, and though he didn't know what he had been expecting, he knew he had not been expecting what he found. He gingerly lifted out a well-loved violin case from where it lay nestled in the folds of a heavy Belstaff coat. “So he actually does play? I mean, beyond the screeching.” 

The corner of Mycroft's mouth turned up infinitesimally. “He's rather proficient, when the mood strikes him.” 

Laying the violin aside on his armchair, John returned to the box and drew out the Belstaff, running the coarse fabric of a lapel between his fingertips. “I'm sure he was very dramatic in this,” he observed with a laugh as he turned to hang it on a hook, next to his own. “Don't suppose he'll have much use for it now. I'm sure he'll like having some of his things around him, though.” 

“My thoughts precisely,” Mycroft agreed, “although I'm certain he'll scoff at the sentiment that led me to keep them. The rest of the boxes contain some of his books. I donated most of the collection to a library, but I found that I didn't wish to part with the ones he had most heavily annotated.” He cleared his throat and gestured to a padded envelope resting on the end of the coffee table. “His phone and his card are there. I couldn't put them in the name of a deceased person, obviously, and I'm certain Sherlock resents having to depend on me to fund his... unusually active afterlife, so I've put them in your name as well as mine, in an attempt to soften the blow, as it were. I trust you won't abuse the privilege, Doctor, but I'll be keeping an eye on the funds all the same. In addition, as Sherlock no doubt infringes upon your use of the space, I considered it only fair to see to his portion of the rent. I've already settled it with Mrs. Hudson.” 

“It certainly seems you've thought of everything,” John acknowledged, feeling as though he ought to protest Mycroft paying part of the rent, until he remembered how much damage Sherlock had already managed to do in just over two weeks. 

“If there is nothing else you think he requires at present, I'll be on my way. I keep a somewhat busy schedule, and I've already delayed you for work. Good morning, Doctor Watson.” Mycroft swept past John, umbrella swaying lazily as he departed. A few moments later, John heard the click of the front door. 

“He must have gone home and eaten an entire cake after he left here last night,” Sherlock quipped as he suddenly materialized out of nowhere, his voice next to John's ear taking the doctor by surprise for the second time in less than an hour. 

“Be nice,” John chided, earning a scowl from the detective, who had taken up the padded envelope from the coffee table and was tearing into it to retrieve his new phone. “It looks like he brought you everything on your Christmas list.” 

“Well, he certainly wouldn't look amiss in a Santa suit,” Sherlock replied with a smirk. 

John felt a bit guilty for laughing, and fled to the bathroom to get ready for work, leaving Sherlock to sort through his treasures in solitude. As he stepped into the shower, he was sure he heard the sound of music faintly over the rush of the water as the detective tuned his violin.

* * *

 


	6. That Insipid Horror Film

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which John attempts to date, Sherlock finds a use for a tiny sliver of pop culture, and Lestrade is helpful.

* * *

 

It was a Friday evening, around ten o'clock, when John made the dubious decision to bring his date back to the flat with him. She was a Brazilian neurosurgeon who had recently relocated to London, and John had had the good fortune to meet her on the tube one evening, about a month after he had moved into Baker Street. They had now been dating for three weeks, and aside from Sherlock being generally irritable about not having a claim on all of John's non-working hours, everything was going smoothly. 

What possessed John to bring her home, when she had a perfectly satisfactory flat of her own not far away, to which they had retreated after dinner and the cinema more than once, he really couldn't say. 

Mercifully, Sherlock wasn't visible or making any commotion when they arrived, and the kitchen table was free of corrosive chemicals and decomposing body parts. John hadn't briefed Luciana on his “flatmate,” and would just as soon prefer not to have to do it now. Or maybe ever. 

John was making tea for them both when Luciana excused herself to the loo. A minute later, a blood-curdling shriek echoed down the hallway, and John's date re-emerged, looking pale and shaken and making straight for her coat on the hook. 

“Wait, Luciana!” John dropped the teacups onto the counter and pursued the distraught woman down the stairs. “What happened?” 

“There is something in that flat!” she accused, rushing outside and looking for a cab. “I'm not staying in there another minute!” 

John supposed it had been too much to ask for Sherlock to make himself scarce and behave for one evening. “Look, Luce, I can explain. Just come back upstairs and have tea. Nothing's going to hurt you.” He tried for his most calming smile, apparently to little effect. 

“No, no one could pay me to go back in there,” she shook her head emphatically, her long dark hair whipping around her shoulders. “And I don't really think this is going to work out.” 

“Wait, what?” John stammered. “Because my flat is haunted?” 

A cab rounded the corner and Luciana waved it down. As she opened the door to get in, she shook her head again, a bit more calmly this time. “No. Because when we're out, you always look as if there's something else you'd rather be doing. And because when we make plans, we're always scheduling around some mysterious errands that you never explain. The fact that your flat is haunted is just the icing on the cake, and honestly, it's not as much of a problem as you saying, 'my flat is haunted,' as if we're talking about whether or not your socks match.” 

And with that, Luciana, beautiful Brazilian neurosurgeon, disappeared into her cab and rejoined the ranks of the many women who were solidly out of John Watson's league. 

John let himself back inside and trudged up the stairs to his flat. He could hear glass clinking in the kitchen, and sure enough, there at the table hovered Sherlock, carefully transferring a bit of something that looked black and mushy and possibly alive, out of a Petri dish and onto a slide. 

“What did you do?” John demanded, crossing to the two abandoned cups of tea and pouring one down the sink before sitting down at the table to drink the other. 

Sherlock looked up, blinking innocently. “When? I've done a lot of things, John. You'll have to be more specific.” 

John heaved a sigh. “My girlfriend just ran out of here screaming, Sherlock, and I'm fairly certain you can offer an explanation.” 

“Of course I can,” Sherlock replied with a smug grin. “You were tired of her.” 

“I was tired of her,” John repeated flatly. “I was- Sherlock, are you out of your mind? Did you _see_ her? I was decidedly _not_ tired of her! And at any rate, I was in here making tea, and did not do anything to make her scream her bloody head off and go sprinting for a cab!” 

The ghost eyed John sceptically and placed the slide on the microscope. “You did. You brought her here, which did in fact lead to her screaming and leaving.” 

Not for the first time, John wished he could will his flatmate back to life, just so he could kill the berk again. He gritted his teeth. “Sherlock. I want you to explain to me exactly what you just did to her, or I swear to god, I will grab that microscope and throw it out the window.” 

“I'll just buy another,” Sherlock replied, waving a hand dismissively. “But if you must know, I took a bit of inspiration from that insipid horror film you were watching Monday evening.” 

John felt a sinking feeling in his gut and plunked his mug down on the table. “Not... not _The Shining_?” 

“Yes! The very one,” the ghost affirmed, and then turned his attention resolutely on his experiment. 

Hesitantly, John rose from the table and made his way down the hall to the bathroom. He pushed the door open and looked around, at first seeing nothing out of place. Just as he was about to turn the light out and leave, however, he saw an open tube of lipstick- Luciana's preferred shade- had rolled behind the toilet. Frowning, he craned his neck to peer around at the back of the door, and burst into a fit of giggles. “REDRUM,” he read, scrawled on the door in Luciana's lipstick.

 

* * *

 

John opted to wait until morning for the requisite discussion on how to behave when one's flatmate brings home a date. 

Saturday mornings usually involved a leisurely cup of coffee and a couple of hours of cleaning up all of the newspapers, books, sticky notes, and other case-related oddments that Sherlock left strewn about in heaps throughout the week. Sherlock's contribution to weekend cleaning generally consisted of lying on the sofa, or floating in the window with his violin. 

This particular Saturday was a violin day. Thankfully, the ghost was choosing to play properly this time, rather than throwing some sort of musical temper tantrum. 

The music abruptly halted. “When you go for the shopping later, I need you to stop by the morgue. Molly is packing up some fingers for me. I just need you to pick them up. And Lestrade isn't answering my texts about an 'accidental death' from yesterday's paper. He thinks he can ignore me because I'm no longer in any position to actually go barging into his office. It should only take a couple of visits from you before he realises his mistake.” 

“I _will_ go pick up your fingers for you, and I will _not_ go get in Lestrade's face for being too slow at answering your texts,” John countered as he lowered himself into his chair, his tone leaving no room for argument. He began scribbling out the shopping list on a notepad. “And I'm not even going to get the fingers for you until we lay down some ground rules for when I have a girlfriend over. For one thing, I'd like you to not scare them out of their wits, if you can help it.” 

Sherlock tossed his violin down on the armchair opposite John, then settled himself down in the chair as well, his violin sticking right through the middle of his transparent form. “Ah, yes. While we're proposing rules, I'd like to suggest one as well. Please don't bring your tedious dates back to our flat.” 

“What, at all?” John frowned and leaned forward, his elbow resting on the arm of his chair, pointing his pen at Sherlock. “Don't you find that a bit of an unreasonable request?” 

“Not at all,” Sherlock replied, bringing his hands together beneath his chin and staring off blankly over John's right shoulder. “I know you're not in the habit of thinking things through, John, but do try to follow along while I walk you through this. First, I refuse to inconvenience myself by stopping my experiments, clearing away anything you find 'questionable,' and making myself invisible and _bored_ for entire evenings so that you can bring women over and carry on all over the flat. As my stupid, meddlesome brother took the trouble of making sure my fair share of the rent is paid, I feel comfortable asserting my right to the free usage of my own home. Second, I am not here to provide break-up services. You can't just bring women over when you tire of them and expect me to drop everything and scare them off for you just because you have somehow failed to run them off yourself. I'm _busy_ , John. My time is valuable.” 

John huffed out a laugh and shook his head. “Well, I'll give you your first point. I understand you're stuck here, and it's not fair for me to ask you to shut up and tuck yourself in a corner. As for your second point, I was _not_ tired of her, and I have noticed that you spend a great deal of your 'valuable' and 'busy' time staring at cracks on the ceiling.” 

“If you weren't tired of her, why did you bring her here?” Sherlock asked accusingly, focusing his sharp eyes on John. “All of your dates were the same, dinner and a film, and not even films you were interested in. You spent the night with her twice; both times you went to her flat, presumably because it was safer than bringing her back here and chancing an encounter with me. Last night, though, you chose to risk it. Why? You were bored and you wanted to end it, but at the same time, you felt she was out of your league and that you shouldn't want to break up with her. The easiest thing would be to come back here and hope that I would do your dirty work for you. Which I did. Not that you've been anything like grateful.” He pulled his violin out of the centre of his abdomen and broadcast his annoyance by playing a few long, screeching notes. 

After a moment, John dropped his gaze back to his shopping list. “She was possibly the most boring woman I've ever dated,” he agreed, “but if it ever again even begins to enter into your head that I want you to break up with someone for me, you may remind yourself that you are mistaken.” He finished his list and rose from his chair to retrieve his coat from the hook. “I'm going for the shopping. And I've changed my mind. If you want your fingers, text Molly and ask her to bring them around.”

 

* * *

 

Of course, in the end, after an hour of nearly incessant texts and several threats to send the furnishings up in smoke, John ended up dropping off the shopping and going right back out to pick up the fingers _and_ go talk with Lestrade. 

“What's in there?” Lestrade asked, leaning back casually in his chair and jerking his chin in the direction of the cooler perched on the corner of his desk. 

John grinned and reached for the lid. “Fingers for something Sherlock's working on. Would you like to see?” 

“No, no, I see enough of that kind of thing, thanks,” Lestrade replied with a tired laugh. “I haven't been ignoring him exactly, you know. Just been busy. And it's not like before, when I could call him down to look at a crime scene, is it? He's a bloody ghost trapped in a flat. I do have some people following up on his theories. It takes time.” 

“And Sherlock's not exactly the patient, understanding type,” John responded sympathetically, sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms. “He's also bloody difficult to keep occupied. Even with your help, and Molly's, and Mycroft's... it's practically a full-time job keeping him from climbing the walls. He likes working at the cold cases, but I get the feeling he misses the excitement of trying to solve something current, something where time is of the essence. Something risky. Something where there's at least the potential of spectacularly losing.” 

One side of Lestrade's mouth quirked up knowingly. “Are we still talking about your poltergeist or are we talking about you? You're starting to sound a bit wistful, there, mate.” 

John shook himself and stood, reaching for the cooler of fingers. “Well, you know, general practice isn't exactly the thrill of a lifetime. But I'm definitely talking about Sherlock. He's actually stooped to the level of picking up haunting tips from horror films. Last night he re-enacted a scene from _The Shining_ in order to get rid of my girlfriend.” 

Lestrade guffawed and slapped the desk. “Someone's jealous, sounds like. Look, John, I'm not really sure what more I can do, but if I think of something that might be interesting for you two- er, for him- I'll let you know.” 

Reaching across the desk to shake Lestrade's hand, John thanked the detective inspector, gingerly picked up his cooler full of fingers, and left Lestrade's office. 

He was out on the kerb, trying to wave down a cab, when Lestrade caught up to him, slightly winded, and clapped a hand on his shoulder. 

“How good's the camera on your phone, mate?” Lestrade asked. 

John frowned in confusion. “Pretty good, why?” 

“Some old lady just called in a pair of bodies tied together and dumped in the alley behind her flat,” the detective inspector explained hurriedly, drawing John away from the kerb by the elbow. “It's not exactly operating within the rules for me to bring you along, but with any luck, it'll be something really weird and you can take home some pictures to your pain-in-the-arse ghost.”

 

* * *

 


	7. What Friends Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock struggles with some of the impracticalities of being dead; John is understanding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, lovelies! I'm aware that it's been several weeks, but October and November are always the craziest months of the year for me. Never fear! I'm hoping to get at least one more chapter done before Formula 1 and Thanksgiving make everything go haywire again. After that, it should be smooth sailing.
> 
> Now, please enjoy a little bit of angsty Sherlock.

* * *

 

It took some doing, but Lestrade managed to convince his team that John was some sort of medical consultant, and then distract everyone sufficiently from the blatant breach of procedure long enough for John to snap about a dozen photos of the crime scene. 

“Just don't, you know, post those on your blog or anything,” Lestrade advised as John retrieved his cooler of fingers from the car so that he could catch a cab home. “If anyone finds out I let some bloke wander in and take pictures with his phone, it'll be my head on a platter.” 

“Of course I won't,” John agreed. “Wait- How do you know about my blog?” 

Lestrade shrugged. “Sherlock said something about it in one of his many texts. Complained about it, more like. I read it now and then. Nice to have him back around without me having to directly deal with him most of the time, you know.” 

“Yes, I can imagine.” John shook Lestrade's hand and hailed a cab. 

Back at Baker Street, Sherlock was in “his” armchair, occupied with two books at once, both of which had been part of a recent Internet shopping spree with his Mycroft-provided card. 

“Took you long enough,” Sherlock complained, glancing up from his books long enough to scowl at John, then drop his gaze to acknowledge the cooler. “Just put those in the refrigerator.” 

Thumping the cooler down on the coffee table, John dropped into his own chair, crossed his arms and glared back at Sherlock. “No. You are more than capable of dragging your lazy arse out of that chair and putting away your own body parts. And if you have a problem with how long it takes me to run your bloody errands, you are more than welcome to find some other idiot to do it for you. And I do not mean Mrs. Hudson.” 

Sherlock closed both of his books and dropped them through his lap into the seat of the chair. “Mrs. Hudson refuses to transport body parts,” the ghost sighed, as if their landlady were being completely unreasonable by drawing a line there. “And if I leave the fingers sitting there long enough, you'll eventually get upset and put them away anyway, so why not just do it now?” 

“No,” John denied, “I am going to leave them sitting there. That cooler won't keep them fresh forever. And when they start to smell, I'm going to chuck them in the bin and refuse to get you new ones. Now, put them away, and stop being difficult for a moment. I've got something for you.” 

“Something for me?” The detective's expression remained carefully bored and petulant, but John didn't miss the way his eyes lit up. “Not something dull, I hope.” 

“Fingers first,” John reminded him. 

“ _Fine_.” Sherlock floated up out of his chair, his ghostly dressing gown swirling dramatically behind him as he scooped up the cooler from the coffee table and disappeared into the kitchen with it. John tried to ignore the ominous clattering coming from the refrigerator as the ghost shoved things around to make space alongside previously uncontaminated foodstuffs. 

A couple of minutes later, Sherlock re-emerged, hovering impatiently beside John's chair. “ _Now_ will you give me whatever tedious thing you've brought home?” His gaze flitted over John's pockets, seeking evidence of anything that didn't belong. 

Reaching for his phone, John opened the album of crime scene photos and handed it over. Sherlock frowned, puzzled for a few seconds as he swiped through the first few shots. Finally, the ghost raised an eyebrow at John. “Either you very rapidly killed two people and dumped their bodies while you were out today, or you convinced Lestrade to take you to a crime scene. If it's the former, I feel compelled to tell you that keeping pictures of your misdeeds on your phone is beyond imbecilic.” 

“I'm afraid it's the latter. I hope you're not too disappointed,” John answered, grinning, “but I'll take your advice under consideration, should I ever murder anyone. And actually, it was Lestrade's idea. You might consider thanking him for it.” 

Sherlock grunted something that passed for acknowledgement and retrieved John's laptop from the desk, busily working on uploading the images so he could view them on a larger screen. Cold cases and fingers seemed to be forgotten. Taking advantage of the peaceful evening an occupied Sherlock afforded him, John switched on the telly for background noise and retreated to the kitchen to make himself dinner. 

Over three hours later, just as John was watching the climactic moment of a low-budget suspense thriller unfold on the telly, Sherlock received a text. Upon reading it, he promptly dropped John's laptop and erupted out of his armchair. 

“Stepdaughter!” The ghost declared, as if John were supposed to know what to do with that cryptic announcement. The detective flickered briefly, reappearing neatly dressed in his suit rather than his pyjamas. “Come along, John.” 

There was no time for John to process what exactly was going on before Sherlock strode across the room and pulled his long Belstaff from the coat hook, shrugging it on and gliding for the door in a whirl of activity. 

“Wait, Sherlock, I thought you couldn't-” John began, just as the ghost attempted to stride through the door. 

Sherlock jolted to a halt, freezing on the threshold as if something had taken him by surprise. He blinked in evident confusion, before casting a glance down at his transparent body. His shoulders sagged in dismay. His coat, which had been hanging on him as if his body were as solid as anyone else's, suddenly refused to be held up any longer and slipped through him, dropping to the floor in a heap. A moment later, Sherlock vanished. Another few seconds after that, every last piece of fragile glass lab equipment in the kitchen, moved by an invisible force, swept off of the kitchen table and shattered on the floor.

 

* * *

  

At first, John didn't worry about Sherlock's prolonged silence; it was hardly the first time the ghost had gone into a sulk and refused to make an appearance or a sound for a couple of days, and John thought it very likely that wounded pride kept Sherlock lying low. By the fifth day, John was attempting to lure Sherlock out of hiding with bribes of newspapers, true crime stories, forensic science textbooks, and a pair of cancerous lungs obtained from Molly; all to no avail. John wondered if missing his troublesome resident ghost was an indicator that he should go back to his therapist. 

After work on Friday, John got a text from Lestrade. 

_Sherlock not answering texts since Saturday. Finally find an exorcist? - Greg_  

John wasn't about to explain that, for some unfathomable reason, he no longer found the idea of a ghost-free flat to be very appealing. 

_No. He's sulking, I think. Haven't seen him. - John_  

_Well, case is solved, no thanks to him. Male victim's stepdaughter in custody. Thought he'd be interested. Pint? - Greg_  

It only made John feel more uneasy, knowing that Sherlock had drawn the correct conclusion a week earlier and was in enough of a strop that he had foregone the opportunity to show off to Lestrade. 

_Not tonight, thanks.- John_  

“Sherlock,” John called out into the silent flat as he settled onto the sofa with his laptop, “If you don't come out right now, I'm throwing out these lungs I brought home, smashing your violin up against a wall, and inviting Mycroft to Sunday dinner every week for the next ten years.” 

“I swear to you, John,” Sherlock's disembodied baritone voice filled the sitting room, “if you think my haunting of this flat has been inconvenient thus far, I will endeavour to make it absolutely unbearable should Mycroft become a regular visitor on the premises.” 

John was kept waiting, chuckling at the efficacy of his threats, for another half a minute before the ghost finally deigned to appear, barely visible and stretched out along the length of the sofa, his transparent legs intersecting John's solid ones. 

“You've been sulking for a week,” John pointed out, keeping his tone sympathetic. “Feeling any better?” 

The transparent toes protruding from the side of John's thigh wriggled in agitation. “I don't know what you're talking about.” 

“Yes, you do. Out of curiosity, have I been sitting right through the middle of you all week?” John gestured vaguely at Sherlock's form taking up every available inch of sitting space. 

Sherlock smirked. “Only the parts of the week when you were sitting on the sofa. Don't worry; I've told you, I don't mind.” 

“Not really the point,” John argued, shaking his head. “It's disconcerting.” 

“Really, John, why must you insist on continuing this tedious argument? You want to use the sofa. I want to use the sofa. We can both do so without inconveniencing each other in the slightest. Why must you over-complicate matters?” Sherlock's tone indicated very clearly that he could not possibly find John's discomfort more boring if he tried. 

“There's such a thing as 'personal space,'” John persisted, fully aware that after two months of losing similar disputes, the argument was more out of habit than anything else. “People generally don't like having it violated.” 

“Hm,” Sherlock grunted dismissively. “Unimportant. Can you feel it?” 

John started to shake his head, then paused, paying closer attention to where Sherlock's legs lay through the same space occupied by his own. “You're a bit cooler than room temperature, maybe. Not so much that I would notice it if I didn't know you were there. You yourself said I've walked through you and didn't notice, more than once.” 

Sherlock's opacity seemed to increase marginally as he began to grow more interested in the topic at hand. He steepled his fingers under his chin and narrowed his eyes at the ceiling, contemplating. “Interesting. I never let any of the previous tenants see me, but some of them seemed to be aware of something, like a draught from a window, if they passed through me. Others had no reaction whatsoever. This implies either a discrepancy in observational powers- likely- or a variance in the sensitivity of different individuals to the phenomenon- possible.” 

In spite of his best efforts, John felt the corners of his mouth turning up. “It must be difficult, being the ghost of a scientist.” 

Sherlock scowled. “How do you mean?” 

“I mean that ghosts are supposed to be flights of fancy, believed in only by the overly superstitious, not taken seriously by reputable scientists anywhere. And yet, here you are, the spectre of a consulting detective with a bloody brilliant rational mind, haunting the flat where you lived.” In an unconscious gesture, John reached out as though to pat Sherlock's knee, startling and drawing back when his fingertips hit nothing but a patch of cool air and the leather upholstery of the sofa. 

The ghost was silent for a long time, pondering the ceiling, and John was just about to give up on the conversation when Sherlock finally dropped his arms to his sides, letting one dangle off the edge of the sofa cushion. “It's the reason I'm still here, you know.” 

John felt his eyebrows drawing together in confusion. “What is?” 

“I died, there, on the floor,” the ghost gestured lazily to a spot next to the sofa, near the end where his head was resting, “and I was looking down on myself, and I realized that I was a spirit. That somehow, in spite of all I had studied and learned and known over the years, in the end I was completely _wrong_ , and I had been more than just cell processes and brain activity all along. And I no longer had a physical brain, or eyes or ears or nervous system, but could still _think_ , could still see and hear everything, could still feel something when someone passed through me. I couldn't just _go_. I had to understand it.” 

“Made much progress on that front over the last two years, then?” John asked, quirking an eyebrow. 

“None,” Sherlock admitted, refusing to take his eyes off of the ceiling. 

Considering the ghost's words, John frowned down at Sherlock's legs crossing through his. “Wait, so you can feel that?” He pointed one finger at their legs in order to clarify. 

“It's really less like a physical sense of feeling, and more that I'm aware of it,” Sherlock replied. “And I-” he hesitated a moment, “It doesn't bother me.” 

“Oh. Oh, right.” A sudden clarity hit John, his thoughts sliding into place and adding up to an acute awareness of the simple fact that after two years of being dead and friendless, unacknowledged even by those few who had associated with him during his life, Sherlock probably enjoyed sharing space with someone who knew he was there and even liked him, most of the time. 

“Listen, Sherlock, I know you're upset because you forgot you were dead and got stuck in the doorway,” John returned to the original topic of conversation, forging ahead bluntly, “but we'll figure something out, all right? Lestrade is obviously not bothered too much by the fact that you're, well, not among the living, and wants to give you cases. You'll just have to do the thinking and trust Lestrade and me with the legwork.” 

“Oh, god, I've died and become Mycroft,” the ghost complained. 

A giggle escaped John before he was able to stop himself. “Come on, Sherlock, I'm trying to help you.” 

“Why, though?” Sherlock demanded, finally turning his attention from the ceiling to John and staring him down with his penetrating gaze. “Why are you so determined to help me?” 

John paused, considering. “That's what friends do.”

 

* * *

 


	8. Some Nonsense About Procedure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As promised, John and Lestrade help make it so Sherlock can work. And oh, how they regret ever having offered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I'm sure some of you have noticed, it has been a really long time since I updated this fic. Please notice that I have now marked the fic complete! After mulling it over for a while, I realized I'm at a good stopping point for this fic, and I would rather continue the story as a series! Anyway, I've begun working on the next bit, but I haven't got an ETA yet.

* * *

 

“Never again,” John declared, sitting in front of the fire with his sprained foot propped up on a makeshift ottoman consisting of a throw cushion stacked on top of one of Sherlock's file boxes. “Never again am I letting you talk me into chasing after some criminal without talking to Lestrade first.” 

Sherlock was pulling photos and notes off the wall, shoving some into a folder to return to Lestrade, and dumping others into another one of his file boxes. John had absolutely no confidence that everything that belonged to Lestrade was actually making its way into the folder. He would have to check it later. 

“I told you, I _did_ talk to Lestrade,” the ghost argued. “He just kept feeding me some nonsense about procedure. By the time he would have gotten around to following up on the lead, Hicks would have cleaned out his safe house and been well out of the country. If I had a body, I would have done it myself, and not stepped into a hole and turned my ankle along the way.” 

“Well, I apologise for being so _inferior_ ,” John snapped, shifting his position in his chair, trying to get a bit more comfortable. “But I'll remind you that I _did_ catch Hicks in the process, and now you get to rub it in Lestrade's face that you were right. The least you could do is make me some tea.” 

Dropping the last of his notes from the case into the box, Sherlock floated down onto the sofa in a reclining position. “You managed to successfully climb the stairs with your crutches; surely there's nothing preventing you from walking from your chair to the kitchen.” 

“You know, I had a date tonight,” John pointed out as he flipped his laptop open. “If I had known you were going to act like such a dick, I would have gone.” 

Sherlock chuckled, and was undoubtedly about to retort, when they both heard footsteps on the stairs. 

“Woohoo! Boys!” Mrs. Hudson announced herself cheerfully before entering the sitting room, carrying a stack of parcels high enough to obstruct her face. To John's surprise, Sherlock immediately rose from the sofa and unburdened Mrs. Hudson of the packages. 

Mrs. Hudson fluttered her fingertips through the ghost's transparent torso just the same way that she would sometimes give John an affectionate pat on the shoulder. “Thank you, dear. Been on another shopping spree?” 

“Nothing better to do,” Sherlock complained as he settled into his armchair and began ripping into boxes. “I wish you had brought these up earlier, Mrs. Hudson. I was dreadfully bored while John was out spraining his ankle.” 

“I was doing your bloody work!” John countered irritably. 

“Sprained your ankle?” Mrs. Hudson gasped. She clucked her tongue sympathetically. “And I bet you're on these crutches here, aren't you? You poor thing, I'll just make you some tea.” 

“Tea would be lovely, thank you, Mrs. Hudson,” John replied gratefully, while simultaneously shooting Sherlock a dirty look. The detective smirked. 

“Sherlock!” Mrs. Hudson chastised as she disappeared into the kitchen, “Look at this mess! And in the kitchen, too! It's a wonder Doctor Watson doesn't poison himself when he cooks.” The rattle of glass indicated that she was attempting to tidy up while she waited for the kettle to boil. 

Sherlock shot up out of his chair, dropping his half-opened box in alarm. “Be careful! You'll disturb my experiment! It's very sensitive.” 

“It looks like mouldy lungs,” Mrs. Hudson observed, sounding doubtful. 

“They _are_ mouldy lungs, obviously,” the ghost huffed, “They were a gift from John, and I've spent sixteen tedious days waiting for sufficient mould to grow. Leave them be.” 

Mrs. Hudson let out a little disgusted noise, and judging by the absence of sound from the kitchen, opted not to pursue tidiness any further. She emerged a few minutes later with John's tea. “Oh, John, dear, I nearly forgot. There was a pretty girl here for you earlier. I hadn't realized you weren't home and I let her up. On her way out, she told me to tell you she didn't appreciate being stood up, and that she found your flat creepy.” 

Taking his tea from his landlady, John frowned and shook his head. “What? No, I didn't stand her up, I sent her a text.” He turned his attention to his flatmate and pointed an accusing finger at the ghost. “And what did you do to her?” 

“You were distracted and never hit send,” Sherlock noted as he freed one of his newly-acquired treasures from a couple of pieces of styrofoam and some bubble wrap. “And I did nothing to her, as per our previous agreement. I ought to have done something, though. She was very nosey. If she had touched my lungs, I would have felt justified in interfering.” 

Fishing his phone out of his pocket and checking his sent messages as Mrs. Hudson made her escape back to her own flat, John confirmed that Sherlock was right; he had never sent the text. “You couldn't have told me this afternoon that I hadn't hit send? And is that-” he frowned at what Sherlock was holding, “Is that a bacteriological incubator?” 

The ghost rolled his eyes. “You know it is. Why do you do that? Ask questions to which you clearly already know the answer.” 

“Just what are planning on doing with that? And just where are you planning on doing it?” John continued, sipping his tea as though it might mitigate his growing alarm. 

“See, you're doing it again,” Sherlock pointed out, annoyed. “It's for incubating bacteria cultures. The only logical place for it is the kitchen.” 

The chime of the doorbell interrupted John from replying, and a few moments later, Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade could be heard exchanging pleasantries in the foyer. When Lestrade appeared in the flat, however, he looked to be in no mood for small talk. 

“What kind of a stunt was that, Sherlock?” the detective inspector demanded, pointing a finger at the ghost. “You bloody well knew where Hicks was headed and sent my team off on a wild goose chase in the opposite direction while you sent John to apprehend him alone! If you were alive, I'd have you arrested.” 

Across from John, Sherlock faded into invisibility, creating the illusion that his precious bacteria incubator, which he was still cradling in his arms, was floating in the air above his chair. 

John could feel his face burning hot as his temper flared. “Wait, what?” He slammed his mug down on the side table next to his chair. “Sherlock Holmes, you better reappear right this instant and explain to me why you flat-out _lied_ to me. You told me Lestrade brushed you off about following up on the lead! I sprained my ankle, Sherlock!” 

The incubator dropped into Sherlock's chair, and when the detective replied, his voice came from near the ceiling in front of the fireplace. “You survived a _war zone_ , John; I assumed you were up to the challenge of uneven pavement at night. Evidently, I overestimated your abilities. It won't happen again.” 

Lestrade threw his hands up and stalked over to the sofa and took up the case folder from the coffee table, beginning to sort through it to make sure everything was there. “You can't do things like this, Sherlock,” he chastised wearily. “John and I have gone through a lot of trouble to arrange things so you can work. If you can't behave, you can't have cases.” 

“If there's anything missing from the folder, it's probably in that box next to you,” John advised, and Lestrade pulled the box toward him to begin picking through it as John returned his attention to the ceiling. “You did this to sabotage my date, didn't you? Unbelievable.” 

“Wait,” Lestrade interjected as he retrieved a few photographs from the file box and stuffed them into the folder, “Are you telling me this was some kind of jealous temper tantrum? Sherlock, I'm serious, one more time, and you'll never get a case from me again.” 

The ghost finally reappeared, hovering now in the kitchen doorway. “Don't be tedious, Lestrade. The perpetrator was apprehended just fine, and you would only be punishing yourself by cutting me off. Besides, I was doing John a favour. He picks indescribably dull women. Too easily distracted by superficial attributes, especially lips and legs.” 

“Keep your domestic squabbles out of my cases, Sherlock,” Lestrade warned, gesturing with the case file as he rose from the sofa. “I'm serious. You want to keep working, you play by the rules. Goodnight, John. Go easy on that ankle.” 

Once Lestrade had left, Sherlock floated back over to his chair, ignoring John's pointed glare as he returned to his remaining unopened parcels. When it became obvious that the ghost wasn't about to offer up any further excuses or explanations for his behaviour, John cleared his throat and broached the topic himself. “You know, it was completely idiotic of you to risk what little work you're able to get, just for the sake of keeping me from getting a bloody girlfriend.” 

“Oh, this one's for you, John,” Sherlock announced, his face a picture of innocence as he held out a package the size of a shirt box for John to take. 

John folded his arms and adamantly refused to touch it. “No. You're not changing the subject.” 

“Of course I am,” Sherlock countered, leaning forward to nudge John's knee with the corner of the box. “I thought if a friend bought you a gift, you were supposed to say 'thank you.' Though I suppose you might thank Mycroft as well, since it _is_ technically his money. And Mrs. Hudson, as I picked from the suggestions she provided.” 

Had John not been so completely knackered, he might have put more effort into being stern with his flatmate, but as it was, appeasing Sherlock was probably the quickest route to being able to hobble into the other room and go to sleep in peace. He accepted the box and broke the tape so that he could pull the lid off. Inside, he found an obviously very expensive charcoal grey cashmere cardigan. 

“Um, it's nice. Thank you.” John ran a hand over one soft sleeve, then glanced up at the ghost suspiciously. “Sorry, what's this for?” 

Sherlock looked decidedly uncomfortable. “Lestrade made me promise to do something nice to thank you for bringing me body parts and getting me work and running errands for me. John, am I going to have to do this type of thing often? Is this one of those 'friend' things? It's dreadful.” 

“So, what you're telling me,” John said, making no attempt to hide his amusement as he folded the cardigan back into its box, “Is that Lestrade put you up to it, Mrs. Hudson determined the gift, Mycroft funded it, and you heroically undertook the laborious task of typing in your card number on the website. Thank you, Sherlock. That's truly thoughtful. Don't worry, I would never expect you to put yourself out to such a degree on a regular basis. Now, about my dates.” 

If looks could kill, Sherlock's scowl would probably have been sufficient to provide 221B with its second ghostly inhabitant. “Oh, yes, by all means, do explain to me how important your dates are. _Again._ Maybe be convincing this time.” He dramatically swept up out of his chair, incubator in hand, and glided into the kitchen with it. 

With a tired sigh, John set aside his laptop without having used it at all, pushed himself to his feet and fumbled with his crutches before slowly hobbling into the kitchen after his troublesome flatmate. “You know, maybe we'll just leave this discussion for the morning. I really don't have the energy to argue with you about it right now. I'm for bed.” He awkwardly manoeuvred his crutches around the kitchen table and thumped down the hall to the bedroom. 

A few minutes later, as John was trying to make his injured foot comfortable on a spare pillow, the barely-noticeable glow that was Sherlock floated into the darkened room and took up a position hovering just over the unoccupied half of the bed. 

“Really, Sherlock?” John sighed irritably. 

“Go to sleep, John,” the ghost ordered. “I've gotten rather used to listening to you snore while I think, and I need you sharp in the morning to discuss a matter of some importance. More important than your dating failures.” 

John reached up and rubbed a hand over his face. “And what might that be?” 

The glow shifted as Sherlock steepled his fingers under his chin. “I want to re-establish my consulting business.” 

“Oh, for god's sake.”

 

* * *

 


End file.
